Abstract
AbstractLocation privacy has became an emerging topic due to the pervasiveness of Location-Based Services (LBSs). When sharing location, a certain degree of privacy can be achieved through the use of Location Privacy-Preserving Mechanisms (LPPMs), in where an obfuscated version of the exact user location is reported instead. However, even obfuscated location reports disclose information which poses a risk to privacy. Based on the formal notion of differential privacy, Geo-indistinguishability has been proposed to design LPPMs that limit the amount of information that is disclosed to a potential adversary observing the reports. While promising, this notion considers reports to be independent from each other, thus discarding the potential threat that arises from exploring the correlation between reports. This assumption might hold for the sporadic release of data, however, there is still no formal nor quantitative boundary between sporadic and continuous reports and thus we argue that the consideration of independence is valid depending on the frequency of reports made by the user. This work intends to fill this research gap through a quantitative evaluation of the impact on the privacy level of Geo-indistinguishability under different frequency of reports. Towards this end, state-of-the-art localization attacks and a tracking attack are implemented against a Geo-indistinguishable LPPM under several values of privacy budget and the privacy level is measured along different frequencies of updates using real mobility data.

Abstract
Due to the pervasiveness of always connected devices, large amounts of heterogeneous data are continuously being collected. Beyond the benefits that accrue for the users, there are private and sensitive information that is exposed. Therefore, Privacy-Preserving Mechanisms (PPMs) are crucial to protect users' privacy. In this paper, we perform a thorough study of the state of the art on the following topics: heterogeneous data types, PPMs, and tools for privacy protection. Building from the achieved knowledge, we propose a privacy taxonomy that establishes a relation between different types of data and suitable PPMs for the characteristics of those data types. Moreover, we perform a systematic analysis of solutions for privacy protection, by presenting and comparing privacy tools. From the performed analysis, we identify open challenges and future directions, namely, in the development of novel PPMs. (C) 2021 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Inc.

Abstract
The multitude of applications and security configurations of mobile devices requires automated approaches for effective user privacy protection. Current permission managers, the core mechanism for privacy protection in smartphones, have shown to be ineffective by failing to account for privacy's contextual dependency and personal preferences within context. In this paper we focus on the relation between privacy decisions (e.g. grant or deny a permission request) and their surrounding context, through an analysis of a real world dataset obtained in campaigns with 93 users. We leverage such findings and the collected data to develop methods for automated, personalized and context-aware privacy protection, so as to predict users' preferences with respect to permission requests. Our analysis reveals that while contextual features have some relevance in privacy decisions, the increase in prediction performance of using such features is minimal, since two features alone are capable of capturing a relevant effect of context changes, namely the category of the requesting application and the requested permission. Our methods for prediction of privacy preferences achieved an F1 score of 0.88, while reducing the number of privacy violations by 28% when compared to the standard Android permission manager.

Abstract
Location privacy is a major concern in the current digital society, due to the sensitive information that can be inferred from location data. This has led smartphones' Operating Systems (OSs) to strongly tighten access to location information in the last few years. The same tightening has, however, not yet happened when it comes to our second most carried around device: the laptop. In this work, we demonstrate the privacy risks resulting from the fact that major laptop OSs still expose WiFi data to installed software, thus enabling to infer location information from WiFi Access Points (APs). Using data collected in a real-world experiment, we show that laptops are often carried along with smartphones and that a large fraction of our mobility profile can be inferred from WiFi APs accessed on laptops, thus concluding on the need to protect the access to WiFi data on laptops.

Abstract
The pervasiveness of mobile devices has fostered a multitude of services and applications, but also raised serious privacy concerns. In order to avoid users' tracking and/or users' fingerprinting, smartphones have been tightening the access to unique identifiers. Nevertheless, smartphone applications can still collect diverse data from available sensors and smartphone resources. Using real-world data from a field study we performed, this paper demonstrates the possibility of fingerprinting users from Wi-Fi data in mobile devices and the consequent privacy impact. From the performed analysis, we concluded that a single snapshot of a set of scanned Wi-Fi BSSIDs (MAC addresses) per user is enough to uniquely identify about 99% of the users. In addition, the most frequent Wi-Fi BSSID is sufficient to re-identify more than 90% of the users, a percentage that goes up to 97% of the users with the top-2 scanned BSSIDs. The Wi-Fi SSID (network name) also leads to a re-identification risk of about 83% and 97% with 1 and 2 of the strongest Wi-Fi Access Points (APs), respectively.

Abstract
With the massive data collection from different devices, spanning from mobile devices to all sorts of IoT devices, protecting the privacy of users is a fundamental concern. In order to prevent unwanted disclosures, several Privacy-Preserving Mechanisms (PPMs) have been proposed. Nevertheless, due to the lack of a standardized and universal privacy definition, configuring and evaluating PPMs is quite challenging, requiring knowledge that the average user does not have. In this paper, we propose a privacy toolkit - Privkit - to systematize this process and facilitate automated configuration of PPMs. Privkit enables the assessment of privacy-preserving mechanisms with different configurations, while allowing the quantification of the achieved privacy and utility level of various types of data. Privkit is open source and can be extended with new data types, corresponding PPMs, as well as privacy and utility assessment metrics and privacy attacks over such data. This toolkit is available through a Python Package with several state-of-the-art PPMs already implemented, and also accessible through a Web application. Privkit constitutes a unified toolkit that makes the dissemination of new privacy-preserving methods easier and also facilitates reproducibility of research results, through a repository of Jupyter Notebooks that enable reproduction of research results.